J Jan Groeneboer

The Kitchen presents J Jan Groeneboer's Selected Views, a multi-channel, site-specific video installation conceived for The Kitchen’s loft at Westbeth. The installation represents the first iteration of a project the artist has been developing since 2018: following a period of over three years of exploratory research, photography, and writing about the view from his Brooklyn studio, Groeneboer took up a daily practice of filming over the subsequent two and a half years. The resulting footage captures disparate elements of the cityscape that take on unexpected proximities through the artist’s window: the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the Metropolitan Detention Center Brooklyn, a recycling plant, the Gowanus Generating Station, Gowanus Bay, Upper New York Bay, the Port of New York and New Jersey, and the Statue of Liberty. Attending to the presence of the architectures and systems that often are hidden from daily city life, Selected Views reflects on the ways the built environment variously conceals and reveals interconnections between democracy, global capitalism, the prison-industrial complex, and environmental crises.

Presented as the culmination of the artist’s durational process of witnessing, Selected Views follows the cyclical rhythms of weather and industries to offer a portrait of the city at a particular moment in time, raising the question: How can the framing of novel vantage points reveal fundamental aspects of society that are frequently overlooked?